There are two acts of recovery in this book - one of a lost brother, and another of a lost self. Joanne Limburg commemorates both in her third collection, The Autistic Alice. In its title-sequence she uses Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass to explore her own experiences as a girl and young woman. Growing up with undiagnosed Asperger's, she often identified with Alice, a logical and curious child adrift in an arbitrary world. Collaging lines and phrases drawn from the two Alice books, she creates a disturbingly effective language to express the nature, discomfort and alienation of autistic experiences. In her neurodiverse verse, a text can become a rabbit-hole to another world, or a mirror. The poems that make up the book's opening sequence, The Oxygen Man, originally published as a pamphlet, were written in response to the death of Limburg's younger brother, a brilliant chemist who took his own life in 2008. They follow her as she visits the mid-Western town where he lived, worked and died; range back over their shared childhood; and look ahead as she tries to work out what it means to be the one who stays behind.
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[She will harrow this town, she will turn him up,
whole or in pieces. Being a sister,
she knows that brothers are born to trouble
SISTER]
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(Bloodaxe Books, ebook, 23 March 2017, bought from Amazon)
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I've read a few of Limburg's poems in collections from Bloodaxe Books but never a full collection.
The Autistic Alice was a fantastic collection of poems, one of the best I've read in a long time.
The collection is split into three parts; The Oxygen Man, The Autistic Alice and Other Poems.
I enjoyed The Oxygen Man the best, these intense, often sad and very deep poems explore the impact of the suicide of Limberg's brother. The Autistic Alice poems are also pretty great, using the themes of Alice in Wonderland to explore growing up with autism. Most of the poems in The Other Poems were awesome as well.
I write poetry and often use my own experiences as inspiration. These are the kind of poems I like to read as well because I can relate to them the most.
I thought all the poems were fantastic but my favourites were Sister, Welcome to the United States, Notes to an Unwritten Eulogy, In the Garden of Live Flowers, The Mad Hatter's Tea Party, Alice and the Red Queen, Hospital Psalm, Swifts and Dem Bones.
